From human well-being to the well-being of the biosphere : political implications of biopolitical environmentalism

Nikula, Ilari (2012)

Tiivistelmä

This study examines the political and societal implications that derive from the claim of the ecological crisis. Also the ways in which the crisis has been constructed and governed in order for it to lead to these implications are analyzed. For a theoretical framework this thesis uses Michel Foucault’s studies of power and governing. Specific aid in analyzing the environmental knowledge-claims and their usage in governing is provided by Foucault’s concepts of governmentality and biopower.

The invocation of ecological crisis has shifted the primary concerns of politics and policies from human well-being to the well-being of the biosphere. Along with this shift has emerged strong neoliberalizing and depoliticizing trends that are driven by processes that are justified by their capacity to improve the sustainability of societies and individuals. It is argued in this thesis that the strive for sustainability has increased the penetration of neoliberal markets and neoliberal ideas of organizing the social. The depoliticizing effects of the invoked crisis, in turn, reduce the sphere of democratic political deliberation and debate while issues are placed under technocratic management and consensual policy-making of global institutions. In this process fundamental ideological disputes and disagreements are disavowed.

Environmentalism can be seen as working through various techniques of power both on the level of the individual and on the level of global populations. At the global level it seeks to create a global authority with coercive powers to submit all states and societies under one common effort for ‘the greater global good’. At the local level it strives for weak, self-sufficient and self-reliant communities that are inhabited by neoliberal subjects capable of adapting to the changes coming from the outside world without resisting or striving to change the world.

The shift from well-being of human life to the well-being of the biosphere has marked also the upgrading of biopolitics to a wider ‘ecopolitics’ that focuses on the well-being of the environment, instead of the population. This makes human life now subordinate to the representations of ‘nature’. With the perceived ecological crisis, biopower seems to brush away other levels of politics, and, in the process, makes its own reach ever wider as ecopower.